Crisis In Journalism Research Articles

Newspaper literacy and communication for democracy: is there a crisis in South African journalism?

Media theorists such as Barnett (2002), Buckingham (1997 & 2000) and Sampson (1999) describe a perceived crisis hindering the media's ability to inform citizens for participation in democracy. One of the symptoms and causes of this crisis, they argue, is that the media use language that many citizens cannot understand. This article draws on theories and methodologies from linguistics to investigate whether this claim holds true for South African newspapers. The concept of the crisis in journalism is deconstructed in the light of Street's (1984) ideological model of literacy. In a pilot study, multiple readability tests were conducted on one article from each of three newspapers, Business Day, The Herald and Daily Sun. The findings of these tests, and a systemic functional grammar analysis of cohesion and lexical density in the three articles, show that all three newspapers tailor their language to fit their target markets. This, triangulated with the rapid growth in readership of the Daily Sun and the more modest growth of The Herald, suggests that many South Africans are better informed for participation in democracy than in the past, although newspapers can do more to help readers learn a plurality of literacy practices.

Journalism as social networking: The Australian youdecide project and the 2007 federal election

The increasing prevalence of new media technologies and the rise of citizen journalism have coincided with a crisis in industrial journalism — as the figure of the ‘journalist as hero’ is fading, new media forms have facilitated the production of news content ‘from below’ by citizens and ‘pro-am’ journalists. Participation in an action-research project run during the 2007 Australian federal election, youdecide 2007, allowed the authors to gain first-hand insights into the progress of citizen-led news media in Australia, but also allowed us to develop an account of what the work of facilitating citizen journalism involves. These insights are important to understanding the future of professional journalism and journalism education, as more mainstream media organizations move to accommodate and harness user-created content. The article considers the relevance of citizen journalism projects as forms of R&D for understanding news production and distribution in participatory media cultures, and the importance of grounded case studies for moving beyond normative debates about new media and the future of journalism.

Minding the regional news gap

This year’s general election could see the future of the local media becoming one of the central issues of debate. Steven Barnett, an advisor to the House of Lords Communications Committee’s investigation into news and media ownership, suggests that the election will take place against a backdrop of “probably the most cataclysmic financial crisis in journalism since the beginnings of an unfettered press”. In particular he draws attention to the parlous state of regional news on ITV, which, combined with the crises facing local newspapers, could result in major reductions in professional journalism at the local level – a real threat to democracy.

Control societies and the crisis of science journalism

In a brief text written in 1990, Gilles Deleuze took his friend Michel Foucault’s work as a starting point and spoke of new forces at work in society. The great systems masterfully described by Foucault as being related to “discipline” (family, factory, psychiatric hospital, prison, school), were all going through a crisis. On the other hand, the reforms advocated by ministers throughout the world (labour, welfare, education and health reforms) were nothing but ways to protract their anguish. Deleuze named “control society” the emerging configuration.

Unnatural Disaster

Research Article| March 01 2009 Unnatural Disaster: The Crisis of Environmental Journalism Joel Simon Joel Simon 1Joel Simon is executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He has worked as a journalist in California and Latin America and is the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge (Sierra Club Books, 1997). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google World Policy Journal (2009) 26 (1): 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.1.87 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Joel Simon; Unnatural Disaster: The Crisis of Environmental Journalism. World Policy Journal 1 March 2009; 26 (1): 87–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/wopj.2009.26.1.87 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsWorld Policy Journal Search Advanced Search Issue Section: ARTICLE You do not currently have access to this content.

Freedom of the Press

The US media are undergoing a massive transformation, approaching a crisis in journalism, which may portend similar issues in Europe and the rest of the world. Historically, most professional journalism has been done by the print media, especially newspapers. Today, American newspapers are in a state of collapse with circulation dropping at a rapid rate and profitability going to nil or negative. This business is leading to an information crisis that is already having effects on the society and will likely become even more profound, polarizing and perhaps misinforming an entire nation. Print journalists have been the primary suppliers to the electronic media, including television and the internet. This article supplements a speech given at the American Academy in Berlin in May, 2008. It summarizes US media metrics and raises issues of concern about the sustainability of serious journalism in America. While the internet has been the cause of this dilemma, the author sees no economic model that will allow the web in the short term to support major, serious reporting at a large scale. Is the rest of the world about to experience a similar crisis or are media models different enough to avoid such a dramatic fall? This article reflects Baker’s view as a longtime media executive and an academic.

TEACHING JOURNALISTS TO SAVE THE PROFESSION

Concerns about the media industries prioritizing profits over public service has historically given rise to proposals for a more professional model of journalism education (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947; Pulitzer, 1904; Royal Commission on Newspapers, 1981). In the context of neoliberal restructuring and a “professional crisis” in journalism, there have again been proposals for journalism education to help uplift professional journalistic values (Adam, 2001; Bollinger, 2003; Carnegie Corporation, 2005a; Sauvageau, 2004). This paper offers a critique of these recent journalism education reform proposals. While the proponents of professionalizing journalism schools acknowledge the structural and economic changes that are the culprits of the professional crisis in journalism, they place the onus of the solution on journalists, and they propose a model of journalism education that encourages students to refrain from critically analysing the media industries. The advocates of professional journalism schools also hark back to traditional journalistic ideals and notions of objectivity which some critics argue contributes to public apathy and damages prospects for participatory democracy. This paper will conclude by exploring recent proposals for a critical journalism pedagogy, which overcomes some of the problems of the professional reform model (Atton, 2003; Skinner et al., 2001).

Journalism is still not for the faint of heart

In the last issue, following up on the Carnegie Corporation of New York's report, Journalism's Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation, I emphasized that the intellectual and educational demands of a competent journalist just keep growing. For more detail on this, I would urge you to carefully read the articles published in various issues of Nieman Reports over the past eight years or so about education reporting, health and medical reporting, science and environment reporting, and so on. Veterans on every beat emphasize the need for specialized training and long experience to cover those beats, even to the point of many claiming that their own beat requires more experience and education than most or all others. As I wrote in summer, many journalism programs are responding to this need with specialized reporting courses and other initiatives, but that relatively few print and broadcast journalism students are showing much interest in them. Since then, I have been on an educators' panel at a journalists' convention at which a professor at a major research university in one of the country's largest cities confessed that a total of only four undergraduate and graduate students had enrolled in a recently offered science journalism course. (In fact, as I noted, one often wonders how interested many of them are in journalism at all, above and beyond majoring in, and planning to work in, it.) But Journalism's Crisis of Confidence report had another, more subtle, warning in it: that a print or broadcast journalist covering anything other than a war, perhaps now more than any time since a lawyer shot Denver Post proprietors Frederick G. Bonfils and Harry Tammen in 1900, requires varying degrees of courage, patience, tolerance, and ego, or at least a lot of self-confidence. Deborah Howell, Washington Post ombudsman and former Washington bureau chief for Newhouse News Service, is paraphrased in the Carnegie Corporation report as saying, being unafraid is very important, and then quoted, The volume of sheer rudeness is enormous....It affects reporters and editors who switch on the computer in the morning and there are 500 e-mails waiting. That's literally what happens to me. Trying to keep your head when people are screaming at you is not anything anybody teaches you in journalism school or anywhere else. Howell is right that characteristics such as courage, patience, tolerance, and self-confidence cannot be taught in journalism schools, although some students may increasingly demonstrate one or more of those characteristics when they graduate than when they were admitted through some combination of maturation, socialization, and experiences. Logically, that many, probably most, journalists need both some guts and some ability to roll with the punches suggests that students who are not well-suited to be journalists could be, perhaps should be, counseled out of the major and out of the profession. (I'm reminded of an article in the March 1998 American Journalism Review, which said about journalism students at the conservative Christian Regent University, after they've gone through the curriculum, many emerge more convinced than ever that journalism is no place for Christians-but on their own, since Regent professors do not preach that.) In fact, I have pointed out to my students that if we know, or at least if we knew, which personal characteristics tended to make a good journalist and which ones tended to make a poor journalist, shouldn't students with the latter ones be counseled out of the major and away from the profession? (Even on the issue of what I would call literacy, there was a time-not so long ago-when high school students who were excellent writers were counseled to look into journalism, while high school students who were poor writers were counseled to avoid journalism or other professions that required especially good writing skills. …

Care As a Virtue for Journalists

The prevailing normative model of contemporary journalism, drawn primarily from a liberal enlightenment tradition emphasizing universal notions of rights, contributes to what many perceive as a crisis in contemporary journalism; at the least, Kantian models are too "thin" to provide an adequate ethical standard. We consider the extent to which an ethic of care, reconceived to address weaknesses identified in recent scholarly critiques, provides journalists with an alternative framework for moral decision making. We use the concept of unequal ethical pull to rework caring and to promote caring for distant others because caring that remains at the personal level is inadequate as a moral value. We conclude by noting that public journalism and our retooled ethic of care share several important ideals. We suggest a program of mutually beneficial exploration, one that might help today's journalists cultivate the virtue of care as they work toward justice.

Análisis y propuestas sobre la suscripción de revistas del sistema bibliotecario de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Journals are among the most prominent resources among the great range offered on the Web site of General Direction of Libraries (DGB) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which serves to support the information requirements of UNAM’s community. This work begins with a financial analysis of both the print and electronic journals purchased by the DGB from 1999 to 2004. It then presents projects implemented by the UNAM’s library system for responding to the journal crisis in order to maintain an efficient service. A description follows of the agreements and activities undertaken by the libraries that carry out cooperative purchasing of information resources. The essential element among these resources are the journals, regardless of the format they are acquired in, and the main purpose is for sharing information among the 142 libraries that make up the UNAM library network.

Is there a crisis in British journalism?

Is there a crisis in British journalism?

Trust No One (On the Internet)

This article examines the “metastory” surrounding Gary Webb’s 1996 “Dark Alliance” series as a moment of crisis in mainstream journalism. Two forces converge in Webb’s series and its aftermath: (1) establishment journalism confronts and manages the reemergent phenomenon of conspiracy theory, and (2) establishment print-based journalism attempts to organize a relationship with the emergent medium of the internet. When these two forces collide in the profession, conspiracy theories and the web end up mutually defining each other. This problematization of a conspiracy theory has multiple effects—not only in disqualifying the story itself but in reshaping the profession of journalism in its relation to new technology. Eschewing technological determinism, this article demonstrates how a new technology is made sensible through a professional discourse as a way of making it manageable. In turn, professional journalism operates as technical expertise in a liberal political rationality of “governing at a distance.”

Libraries Stuck in the Middle: Reactive vs. Proactive Responses to the Science Journal Crisis

Libraries and the scholarly community share a dream of creating a world where scholarly articles are easily available on the Internet to everyone who wants them, without any fees, restrictions or barriers of any kind. What is preventing us from fulfilling such a noble and worthy goal? This paper examines selected case studies that show how libraries and scholars are coping with the science journal crisis. By highlighting responses that are innovative and proactive, this paper hopes to contribute to a general awareness of responses that have the potential for transforming the current scholarly communication process into an open, unimpeded, author-controlled electronic-journal based scholarly communication process.

The Problem of Journalism: a political economic contribution to an explanation of the crisis in contemporary US journalism

In this article I present a political economic critique of contemporary US journalism, emphasizing the origins and limitations of professional journalism, the commercial attack upon journalism, and the right-wing critique of the liberal media. In my view, the US polity is enmeshed in a deep crisis and the collapse of a viable journalism is a significant factor--but by no means the only one--in explaining the shriveled and dilapidated state of US democracy. A political economic analysis stresses that the reasons for lousy journalism stem not from morally bankrupt or untalented journalists, but from a structure that makes such journalism the rational result of its operations. Hence if we are serious about producing a journalism and political culture suitable to a self-governing society, it is mandatory that there be structural change in the media system. This means explicit and major changes in the public policies that have created and spawned the media status quo.

Competition and Cooperation: Libraries and Publishers in the Transition to Electronic Scholarly Journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially those of large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous 'journal crisis' is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits while providing superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the functions of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries.

Crisis in the Philippines: The Making of a Revolution.

San Juan, a noted Philippine Marxist now living in the United States, gives a detailed account of the Philippine situation from many perspectives. The essays deal with new-imperialism, the Muslim community, literature, the New People's Army, women, and Filipinos in the United States. While Marcos is gone, many of the issues San Juan raises still need attention and the Marxist perspective he uses gives a very different insight than has been heard previously. Thus the work merits serious consideration for academic libraries. Library Journal Crisis in the Philippines is an unparalleled view of the making of a revolution. E. San Juan offers an insider's examination of the unrelenting avalanche of political events, culminated by the summary killing of opposition leader Benigno Aquino. He dramarically illuminates the Filipino people's struggle for self-determination, the actual activities and growth of the New People's Army, and an analysis of the global forces influencing the current crisis. Unprecedented focus is given to the ways in which certain groups within Phillippine society--particularly the feminist movement and the Church--are coalescing with the Left. Poignantly illustrated with photographs of village life, the New People's Army, protest rallies, press and media clippings, this is the first unrestricted story of the Philippine revolution.

PHD Defence: “Journalism Crisis in the Non-West” by Shan Wu

Our dear colleague, Shan Wu, will defend her PHD Dissertation on Thursday, September 8th, 2016 at Mallinson Conference Room (K8652) in SFU Burnaby (6:30 pm - 9:30 pm). Here is the abstract of her dissertation "Uncovering Alternative Conceptions of ‘Journalism Crisis' in the Non-West".